An Experimental Study Of The Development Of Theory Of Mind Of 2-5 Years Old Children

The research on the development of theory of mind (ToM) of children is one of the hottest, most active researches in developmental psychology at present. Although some domestic studies have paid attention to this, the results are not totally unanimous, because of different tasks, materials and instructions were employed in these researches, and systematic research is still rare.This study involved five tasks: "unexpected content task", "mental-physical distinction task", "seeing leads to knowing task", "emotion identified task" and "unexpected location task", the development of "ToM" of 157 children who are 2-5 years old is investigated, so is the correlations between these tasks. The results of research show:(1)" ToM " of 2-5 years old children develop constantly, and 4 years old is the key age in obtaining "ToM";(2)The development of children's "ToM " does not have gender differences;(3)Correlations exist between the five tasks except that " Seeing leads to knowing task " only correlate with " unexpected content task ", this indicates that inherent consistency exists among five tasks.